Miki Dora

By: David Rensin | Chris Rohloff and Pat Darrin | April 01, 2009 | Non Fiction

“One can see everything there is to see in Mickey Dora when he is surfing. He is quick, supremely conscious, and he is always the first to know when the waves are coming and where. His timing and balance defy description. He is upon occasion even playful, but there is no one who takes his surfing more seriously than Mickey Dora.”

“In surfing as in his life, Mickey Dora has made up his own game, plays it by his own rules, harvests his own rewards. Nobody understands him. Even those intelligent to relate seldom grasp what he is saying and doing — because the Cat never lets anyone get too close. He is good at what he does, and he does it with grace and style. That’s enough for me. People like him should be granted special status. Maybe they should be turned into national parks. At the very least they should be left alone.”

“The magazines made a hero out of him. Everything he said was gospel, and they began to look at him as a kind of a god. He complained about surf movies made in Hollywood and yet he’d work for them. He complained about competition and then he’d compete, about the crowds and he was one of the crowd.” 
- LeRoy Grannis, surf photographer emeritus

Debuting in January of 1963, Surf Guide magazine grew in circulation and influence, but it wasn’t until Bill Cleary pried away art director John Van Hamersveld from Surfer in mid-1964 that the competition between the two surf bibles accelerated toward its crescendo.

JOHN VAN HAMERSVELD: Bill Cleary had said, “Come work for me. Let’s do something together.”  I was at Surfer at the time and not supposed to work for anybody else, so says John Severson. I’d done the Endless Summer poster, and he was still pissed off that I did it while I was working for him. Bill and I sat down. “I’m on the entrails of this whole surf thing,” I explained. “The whole thing is just out of control. It doesn’t make sense to go in the water. It doesn’t make sense to work for anybody that’s connected to this. It’s an artificial super-hype thing, and there are a lot of other things to do in the world than this.” It was the Southerners against the Northerners, and I said, “Let’s take the north and focus on the archetype” — the Malibu thing — “and let’s take the people we know who are so great and a part of it, and have interviews.”

The Golden Age of surfing was over. It was the mid-’60s. Kennedy was dead, the government, the war, the draft — all those issues are going on. What are we to do? We’re like ducks on a telephone line. So we mobilized in the Surf Guide office. We got a room and I set up a storyboard, and kind of designed the magazine. Feigel sold the ads. Jim Ganzer was my paste-up assistant. Jimmy Fitzpatrick is the skateboarder on the team. The publisher, R.L. Stevenson, is a kind of entrepreneur. Bill is very charming; he’s living in Topanga in one of the rooms off the Fitzpatrick house. It’s quite amazing.

Cleary had already scored with The Angry Young Man of Surfing. As the first full-length interview ever given by Dora, the text introduced him to generation of post-Gidget surfers. The story was also a wake-up call and notice to his peers who, familiar with the Dora persona, were either horrified or bemused to read it in print.  After Van Hamersveld’s arrival, Cleary wanted to take another shot with Dora. This time the King of Malibu resisted.

“One time around with you was enough, sweetheart,” Cleary reported as Dora’s response in the Nine Lives of Da Cat. “Forget it. I still say surfing magazines are for illiterates. Why else do you think they all look like comic books? The creepos who buy that magazine of yours can’t even read, so why should I waste my breath?’

Another factor, according to Jim (later Jimmy Z) Ganzer, “Miki hadn’t done too many interviews. Whatever he did, he wanted to do it in a very special way, with a lot of constraints so you wouldn’t really know what you had. He was a strange character.”

“But Cleary was also a tricky guy,” Bob Beadle remembers. “He’d resort to anything in order to embellish or direct the “novel” that he was writing. He’d do anything. Anything.”

The “anything” Beadle refers could account for the story of how Cleary managed to get that interview with Dora for the November 1964 Malibu issue. Rumor has it that the subterfuge required what Cleary later described as “rigging a couple of tape recorders, wiring them into my answering machine and stashing them out of sight.”  Then Cleary gathered interviews with the other story principals – Lance Carson, Kemp Aaberg, Tom Morey, Dave Rochlen – and waited for word to spread, and Miki to feel left out. Cleary figured that Da Cat is always curious.  Cleary was right. Dora dropped by. They “had a beer and watched the sunset.”  Then Cleary flicked on the tape recorders and prodded Dora into conversation. “Listening to the tape later, I knew I had got exactly what I wanted.  His dialog was perfect. I could print it word for word.”  But had he?

BARBARA DENTZEL CLEARY: Bill told me the story of secretly taping Miki over and over again. That is 100 percent Bill. He was into the fun, secret I Spy stuff. I have no doubt it happened.

JIM GANZER: Cleary had hidden the recorder and did the interview during a typical social day surfing at Topanga. So Miki being Miki, he talked about everything from the demise of Western civilization, right on down the line. Remember, Cleary is a young novelist with a lot of energy, an ex-Marine who was at Camp Pendleton taking away people’s boards. He was the bad guy who became a good guy. Later, Cleary played back this interview for me one afternoon, and I was just in stitches because Miki had this fascinating delivery, a fantastic patois and canter, if you will. We still use it all the time. If we’re in any situation where we feel like we’re capering, we’ll break right into being Miki ... baby. I said to Cleary, “Can you write it like that?” And he did. When it came out, Miki was furious because it was verbatim. It caught the inflection. Somebody else could read it and sound like Miki Dora, and he hated that. It was too much for him. It flipped him out; nobody had done that to him before. The interview was such an overwhelming success — people’s recognition and love for Miki just skyrocketed at that point. Right after that was when The Cat models and all that stuff started to happen.

But not everyone is so sure.

JIM FITZPATRICK: I never saw Bill use a tape recorder, and I never heard a tape. It’s possible, though. Cleary was bright and capable enough to 1) as a creative writer, create anything and make it sound authentic, and 2) was capable of remembering conversations nearly verbatim. But whatever happened, Miki seemed to feel betrayed because his conversations weren’t to be published. They were serious stuff between peers discussing ideas, and he trusted that relationship. He wasn’t just talking. In one way or another, I don’t think Bill published the story with Miki’s full approval.

BOB FEIGEL:  Bill had an active imagination and his memory could be very selective and self-serving. But having said that, I’m still of the opinion that the “secret” taped interview episode actually took place in some form or other because I remember Bill talking about it shortly after the event. Nor was it one of the stories that he embellished or changed during the intervening years. The story originally involved one or two tape recorders — and I do know that he had two reel-to-reel recorders. He also showed me where he’d hidden the microphones. Bill and I talked about a lot of things during that period because we spent weeks and weeks driving to Costa Rica from Malibu and back. He was gleeful that he got one over on Miki — who was always getting one over on everyone else. After the story came out, Miki stormed into the Surf Guide warehouse at 26th and Colorado. He was pissed off, giving everyone dirty looks. Later I heard him and Cleary screaming about it. He had been taken for more than he was willing to give. He was angry.  Eventually they called a truce. Dora’s rationale, according to Cleary: “At least you didn’t misquote me.”

Or maybe ...

DARRYL STOLPER: Miki and I had worked on a script for one interview. He always wanted to look controversial and sort of Mort Sahl-ish. We would try to come up with things for him to say that made him look controversial but not criminal. We went over it on the phone for two or three days — how much information they wanted, what we wanted to talk about, things like that. We’d kick around different ideas that would make Miki look like Miki. One of the scripts we worked on was supposedly for an interview done with a secret microphone by Bill Cleary.

Dora being Dora, he didn’t always shy away from the microphone.

PETER DIXON: When I started to write my book, Men Who Ride Mountains, I needed Miki’s help. The book was in several sections; one was the Malibu scene. I began audiotaping various people. Miki was very important — and a little bit difficult to pin down. I thought, this guy’s being exploited a lot; they want him for this, they want him for that and nobody’s paying him. I was being paid a pretty good sum of money by Bantam Books, so I figured if I was going to ask Miki for his time, I’d better pay him something. I made it a business proposition. I said, “What do you think, Miki? I don’t want to exploit you, but I want to hear what you have to say and I want to ask you some questions.”

He looked at me, quite surprised that I was treating him as a professional, and maybe a professional storyteller. He said, “OK. What do you want to pay?”

I said, “I don’t know. I’ve never done this. I’ve $200 or $300 left over from the advance. How about $20 an hour.” This was in 1965, so it’s probably equal to $100 an hour today. He liked that. He said, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

I had a teeny office under a beach house at Topanga. Cleary was up the beach and was publishing Surf Guide magazine, for which I had written many short stories.  I said, “Come on over to my office at 3:30 tomorrow.” He said, “I’ll be there.” Sure enough, at 3:30 he was promptly there, and he was prepared.  I had a list of questions. He was sort of formal at first and then began to relax. He didn’t so much tell me about his early days and Gard Chapin and all that, but what he felt about surfing at that time. How he really liked it and how he felt it was going to hell and was being exploited. And that he may not have been surfing as well then as he was five years ago, and that’s why he didn’t want to go into competition.  We had about five sessions. Every time he was there on time. There was no friction. No great ego. He was being professional.

He went through his life story: how he grew up, Malibu and the Pit, Tubesteak and all that. He was very matter-of-fact. He didn’t act and wasn’t expansive until he got to talking about what was happening to surfing. I can see in my mind’s eye today his body posture sort of withdrawing in a gesture that I interpreted as, “I’m not so happy about this any more.” 

I never told anybody about the interviews, and I sensed that he would not want me to talk about it. It was just between the two of us. I had written three other books previously, and evidently he knew of my work and respected it. Also, I’d written many magazine pieces. When I had all this tape together, I began listening to it and it was almost a confessional. At that time, I wasn’t perceptive enough to see that I really had something: a document about this guy’s soul. I just wanted to tell a story that I could put in the book. 

Finally, when I had finished editing Men Who Ride Mountains, Miki got short shrift. I could only give him several pages when he should have had the whole chapter.

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